How Oracle Saved the America's Cup

Team USA beats Team New Zealand by 44 seconds in the winner-take-all 19th race of the America's Cup. The WSJ's Stu Woo tells us how the race will go down as one of the most controversial in history.

Oracle Team USA, the resilient crew of sailors who capped an epic comeback Wednesday to win the America's Cup, had spent hundreds of hours at sea over the past three years preparing to win this 162-year-old yacht race.

But in the end, the victory came down to one of the oldest methods of rescue in team sports: calling a timeout to make adjustments.

The defending America's Cup champion Oracle team, which is financed by billionaire Oracle Corp. founder Larry Ellison, struggled early in the final, falling behind Emirates Team New Zealand 8 races to 1. Then, something clicked. The Oracle boat began to dominate, erasing deficits on San Francisco Bay with ease and accelerating to win by sometimes yawning margins. It finished the comeback Wednesday to take the first-to-nine-wins series, 9-8.

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The Kiwis, who were funded by the New Zealand government and a mishmash of corporate sponsors, suddenly looked hapless. By any reasonable standard, the eight straight wins Oracle reeled off to win the Cup rank among the most impressive comebacks in the history of sports. "These guys just showed so much heart," said Oracle skipper Jimmy Spithill.

Given the extraordinary complexity of these seven-ton double-hulled, carbon-fiber catamarans, which were built expressly for this iteration of the race, it's hard for everyday sailors, let alone engineers, to know what really makes them tick. And given that the teams are free to tweak the boats between races, the puzzle is even more complex.

Battle for the America's Cup

Emirates Team New Zealand in action during the race. Getty Images

In the hours after the race, Oracle credited its resurgence to a combination of improvising on the fly, gambling on wind conditions and, as in any sports comeback, getting very lucky.

Six weeks before the Cup began on Sept. 7, Oracle examined a sailing technique called foiling. This involves lifting its boat's two hulls out of the water, by balancing on L-shaped boards called foils, to reduce drag and increase speed. The boats had already foiled downwind, so the team studied whether it could do so on the course's upwind leg, where boats must sail about 45 degrees to the wind and make a series of zigzag turns.

The problem was that the yacht needed to be moving especially fast to elevate on its foils. And to get the extra speed, the boat would have to avoid headwinds by sailing on a less-direct zigzag course.

Oracle didn't like the test results and decided against the tactic. "They had it so wrong out of the blocks," said Ken Read, a former America's Cup skipper and current NBC Sports analyst. "It's shocking how much technology they had at their disposal and came out so wrong upwind."

But when the regatta started, one team did foil upwind: New Zealand. The Kiwis trounced Oracle in six of the first seven races, building enormous leads on the upwind segment.

ENLARGE

Oracle Team USA in action.
Getty Images

During that first week, a flustered Oracle team called a "timeout" to postpone a race and regroup. The team's 11 sailors spent the off days studying upwind foiling again. They realized the technique had two advantages: the speed boost offset the greater distance the boat had to travel. And they could better maintain speed on zigzag turns, which are called tacks, with the boat's hull above the water. "You cover more ground, but you're going into the tack at a faster speed," Oracle chief Russell Coutts said Sunday.

Oracle adopted the technique and immediately started equaling the Kiwis on the upwind leg. Then, in the last few races, breezed past them. "We just had to configure the boat properly," Ellison said Wednesday. "The guys on the engineering team finally...broke the code. Russell talked about driving the boat lower and faster, rather than higher and slower."

In Wednesday's clincher, Oracle turned a three-second deficit at the start of the segment into a 26-second advantage. It won by 44 seconds.

Oracle also started aggressively outfitting its boat for weather conditions. On the yacht's front is a spot for a giant pole, called a spine, for an auxiliary sail. In the first week of racing, Oracle had been keeping a spine there for a bigger sail designed for light winds. But the first week of racing featured only heavy wind, so the spine added unnecessary drag to the boat. It was like carrying an umbrella if the forecast called for a 40% chance of rain. After the first week, Oracle started removing the spine if the forecast called for heavy winds. "We were probably too conservative in those early races," Coutts said. "If you don't have it and you get that wind condition, game over. You're screwed with a capital F."

Then there's the matter of luck. Twice during this event, New Zealand had a commanding lead in a race—only for it to be called off. The first time was a result of high winds that exceeded the strict limits that were put in place after a fatal May accident involving the Swedish team.

The second occurred Friday, when New Zealand, needing just one more win to return the Cup to Auckland, had a nearly mile-long lead, but could not finish within the 40-minute time limit because the wind was too light.

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